With the advent of supermarkets in the latter half of the twentieth century, shoppers found they could buy an increasing variety of goods in a single store. With this ability came a consistent need for shopping carts to handle the diversity and quantity of goods that shoppers could buy at one location. This evolution however also increased the complexity of the typical shopping trip; shoppers now often needed lists to provide reminders of all the goods they desired, and price comparisons and coupon shopping became a frequent exercise as competing brands battled for consumers' business.
To address the consumers' needs for organization of lists and coupons, shopping aids were developed. Often configured as devices that would physically attach to shopping carts, these aids often focused on providing a clipboard and writing surface to enable a shopper to both attach a shopping list and to facilitate checking items off the list or to add new items to the list while the shopper was pushing a shopping cart.
Many early designs reflected the approach that the shopping aid had to provide a firm, relatively horizontal writing surface, or “desk.” Because permitting the shopper to write was an essential aspect, these designs often required bulky clipboards and complicated mounting mechanisms in order to provide needed writing surface stability. These designs also often obstructed the child seat built into many shopping carts and they tended to not be very portable.
Other designs reflected an approach of reconciling the need for a firm writing surface with the perception that portability was essential to acceptance by the shopper; these designs also typically emphasized a flat, horizontal writing surface, but they often either compromised writing surface support structures to make the aid more portable or they created complicated folding mechanisms, to “break down” the size of the writing surface. While useful for their intended purposes, these shopping aids still tended to not be very portable and the bulk of a writing surface still made it impractical to fit the shopping aids into a purse or pocket. The complicated mechanisms used to make the devices foldable or compactable often also dramatically increased the cost of these devices.
There continues to be a need for a shopping aid that is both practical and low cost. Ideally, such a shopping aid would be compact, such that it could fit into a purse, or perhaps even a pocket, making it easy for a shopper to take the aid from home to a store. Ideally still, such a device could be selectively attached to and detached from a conventional shopping cart, yet would not have the conventional compromises needed to support a bulky writing surface, e.g., a complex support structure to stably support the writing surface with respect to the shopping cart. The present invention satisfies these needs and provides further, related advantages.